


Cassiopeia

by shewhotalkstohyacinths



Category: Adam (2009), Charlie Countryman (2013)
Genre: Attempted Murder, Crime, Hospital, Hurt Adam, M/M, Protective Nigel, Revenge, asd, hurt comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 11:17:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3288332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewhotalkstohyacinths/pseuds/shewhotalkstohyacinths
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt was as follows:</p><p>um adam got hurt somehow and ends up in the hospital, nothing major, but nigel gets hella possessive and angry bc he just wants to keep his little spaceman safe <333</p><p>In which Adam gets hurt and Nigel seeks revenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cassiopeia

It’s a disturbing end to a quiet night.

The shot comes unexpectedly, a loud sound in a calm space that cracks the air between them. An innocent might automatically assume a backfiring car engine, perhaps a firecracker, but Nigel is not an innocent man. He is versed in the sound of gunfire, could tell the make and model of a weapon just by the noise it makes as it ricochets off his eardrums. His immediate response is to return the gesture, to harmonise violently with his own chords. It’s instinctive, a true second nature born from a life of crime.

He cannot retaliate tonight. Not here. 

Not now.

He’s not alone.

There’s blood in the snow. He can see it, now that he’s looking. Seeing his own perfect, intact body he realises to his horror that’s he’s not the one who’s been hit.

Adam sounds confused, his voice a tiny yelp as it falls from his lips.

“Nigel?”

“Oh shit, Adam – “

There is no pain as the younger man falls slowly to his knees, a blossom of red spreading out over his stomach. It’s as warm as the air is cold and, as he looks down to eye the source of the warmth and the wetness, there is nothing like fear in his eyes. They are curious and alert, fascinated by the colour as it paints him.

“Nigel, look.”

He’s strangely detached, as if that blood belong to someone else.

"I’m bleeding. You see?”

“Shit, dude, you hit the wrong guy. Let’s get the fuck out of here."

The screech of tyres on a battered old motorbike indicates that Adam’s assailants are getting away. Nigel looks up and catches one of them in the eye and he’s torn; torn between holding onto Adam for dear life and ending theirs for what they’ve done to him. They’re small time idiots, local ‘prospects’ out to score a big hit on a high flyer. 

They work for Hector Alvarez, that much he knows, and they’re a long way from home. 

The cowards had been hiding in the parking lot, aiming to take him out in his down time.

It’s the equivalent of shooting a man in the back.

“Go. Go, before he blows my fucking head off.”

Nigel’s gun is in a briefcase in the trunk of his car. To retrieve it, he would have to let go of Adam and, for the first time in as long as he can remember, saving the life of a man outweighs the need to end the life of another.

He lets them go because he cannot let Adam go.

“Nigel – “

“Shh. Don’t try to talk, Adam.”

Adam points to Nigel’s white tee, his own blood splattered all over it, and he tells him the pattern looks like a galaxy; like a cluster of stars. His voice is weak, but he’s not afraid.  
He’s not afraid because Nigel has him. 

"It looks like Cassiopeia, only red. Cassiopeia is a constellation.”

“I know. Shh.”

“Do you see it?”

Only Adam could see something celestial in blood splatter. Only he could make something beautiful out of something so fucking ugly. 

"Yeah. Yeah, Adam, I see it.”

(*)

Nigel is not a patient man. It’s one of his flaws, always has been. He reined it in over time, is less impulsive than he was as a very young man, but tension sets in regression. Fear sends him backwards until all of a sudden he’s twenty years old and these doctors are not helping, they’re obstructing.  


The place smells like death, like antiseptic and metal. He hates the thought of Adam being somewhere in there alone and afraid but they haven’t let him in to see him, not since they got here.

He’s in surgery, and Nigel doesn’t know what the fuck is going on while he’s laid out on a slab with his belly cut open. He doesn’t want to think about it but can’t bear being kept in the dark. 

It’s torture, this waiting, because the one thing that keeps playing on Nigel’s mind is that the bullet was meant for him.

Perhaps it should’ve hit him.  
It would’ve put an end to the madness that is his life.

Nigel isn’t known in this town, not well enough to need to hide. It’s partly why they came here, so Nigel could lay low and so Adam could thrive asideof him. His reputation, whilst fierce, does not scream so loudly when he’s living under a false name and, with Adam’s influence, he can almost pass for a regular person.

Almost, but not quite.

Anonymity doesn’t stop him from pacing once the police arrive and his instinctive response is to obstruct.

“Sir, we just need to ask a few questions.”

“And, I’m telling you that I’m not in the right frame of mind to answer, now leave me the fuck alone and I’ll talk to you when I know he’s safe.”

They demand a statement which he refuses to give and it’s only when he plays the frantic, terrified lover that they retreat. 

Adam has been in surgery for ninety minutes when he finally pulls free of his cover and punches a wall, the only method of steam-letting he knows of. He can tell from experience that his knuckles aren’t broken so he sits back in the waiting room, an ice pack on his hand and a warning in his ear that, if he doesn’t calm down, he’ll be removed permanently.

It’s the thought of Adam waking up alone that pacifies him, an emotional restraint over a man who once prided himself on his ability not to feel them.

Such a hold he has over him, a lamb taming the lion he once was.

(*)

The surgeon speaks to him at that critical juncture between calm and frantic and Nigel doesn’t miss the way he approaches as one might approach a wounded animal, with caution and care, with steady steps and no sudden movements.

He knows he seems volatile, is aware of the impression he gives.

So much for a quiet life.

Right now, he’s just an anxious loved one, just like the rest of them.  
It’s a sad club to be a part of.

“How is he?”

"He’s lucky you were there. You stemmed the bleeding. If you hadn’t done what you did it could’ve been a very different story. We transfused him when he was admitted, as I’m sure you were informed, and he stabilised relatively quickly.”

Nigel is so used to being the cause of death that it’s an alien concept, being the one to prevent it. It feels otherworldly, the thought that Adam’s life was in his hands and he saved it but the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. 

A universe without that bright star is not a universe worth living in at all.

It’s crushing, to imagine.

It’s hard to bear.

“Thank fuck.”

“He was agitated when he came round from anasthesia, albeit briefly. He…lashed out at his attending doctor when he tried to take his vitals. Split his lip. I think it’s going to need stitches.”

"Fuck. Seriously?”

Nigel shouldn’t feel proud but he does somehow, proud that his boy was still fighting even when his life blood was pouring out of a hole in his gut.

He darkens only when he contemplates the ramifications.

“Shit. You didn’t restrain him, did you?”

"We thought it best to sedate him rather than restrain, taking his condition into consideration. We’ll be keeping him quiet for the next day or so until he’s more able to process his environment. With patients on the spectrum, this can be a frightening experience. It’s best to reduce their anxiety levels as much as we can."

"So, the surgery went well?”

"Yes. No complications. He’ll be nil by mouth for the next week or so, so he’ll have to remain with us but, all things considered, he was lucky. Like I said, it could’ve been much worse. Internal damage was minimal. Whoever went at him wasn’t a good shot."

(No shit. He was aiming for me.)

Nigel tries not to think of how much worse it could’ve been. He tries not to think of how much it matters to him because that’s something he has been pushing to the back of his mind for a long, long time because ties are something he can’t afford.  
The fact that he aches to see him is something which tells him he’s been pissing against the wind.

"Can you take me to him?"

"Of course.”

(*)

It hurts to look.

Adam’s skin looks white. There are bandages wrapped round his abdomen, drains inserted that pull blood away from the site where the bullet hit and the surgeon’s knife cut through. 

They’re feeding him through a tube while his stomach heals and, God, Nigel would give anything to endure another Mac and Cheese so that he didn’t have to see it; to know how hurt Adam really was.

“Hey,” he whispers, brushing his hand across the sleeping man’s forehead. “Hey, Adam.” 

It’s hard to fight down the anger, to stop himself from driving this fist into the wall again, but he knows that Adam would not like the noise and the tension and he doesn’t deserve to be frightened any more than he already has been.

“You did good, kid. Punching out doctors? Never thought you had it in you. You’ve been holding out on me.”

Even as heavily sedated as he is, Adam stims. That breaks through. His fingers tap weakly against the side of his leg in that same repetitive motion and Nigel knows, if he were awake, that he would be reeling off statistics about the levels of radiation in hospitals and the total monthly cost of electricity in this single room alone. 

He’s not used to Adam being so silent.

He’ll never wish for it again. 

(*)

"Did you know," Adam whispers when he finally awakens, "that, after a prolonged period of time in space, the human heart shrinks?"

Nigel startles, having drifted off in the quiet.

“You’re awake.”

Adam’s eyes move to the monitor next to his bed, glazed and unfocused, watching the jagged rise and fall of his pulse as it displays on the screen. The stimming increases with his wakefulness as the sedation wears off. He’s grasping and releasing his sheets with such regularity that Nigel’s worried he’ll tear them.

It unsettles him, seeing Adam unsettled, seeing him jerk and twitch in the bed as if fighting for some control of himself.

He senses a storm approaching and he doesn’t know how to stop it in this strange, unnatural place.

"104 beats per minute. I have tachycardia. It’s a Latin word. It means fast heart rate. Astronauts need to have optimum cardiac fitness."

His first thought is always of the stars.

His last thought, before he had lost consciousness, had been of Nigel.

“They’d never clear me for space travel with 104 beats per minute. The insurance would be sky high.”

"Then, we’d just have to find some other way, wouldn’t we, whatever the cost."

Nigel would give him the moon and the stars to make him happy. The thought scares him to Hell and back.

What scares him more is the way Adam’s jaw tenses with every pulsing bleep of the monitors, the way his head falls back in the pillow and his body becomes rigid. He focuses on his breathing, making it appear forced and unnatural. His lips mouth numbers. 

One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four five. 

It’s a mantra his father taught him when things became too much.

His eyes dart, frightened and indistinct, and that’s the deal breaker. 

"Are you feeling okay? Adam, do you hurt?"

He flinches wildly when Nigel reaches for him, his body curling inward, an unconscious movement out of his control. The trust, hard earned, appears to be gone, lost admidst the discomfort and the overstimulation of post-surgery.

“It’s okay. It’s okay, I’m here.” 

"N-no."

"You’re okay.”

"Please."

He doesn’t want to be touched, can’t bear it. Not now. Not with this pain, with this confusion, with these drugs leaving him incapable of regulating himself. Nigel should’ve known, should’ve remembered, but seeing someone he cares about in such a state renders him lost.

“Adam, I don’t know what the fuck to do for you.”

The alarms on the monitors scream loudly, his flawed heart reaching 139, 146, 167, and panicked blue eyes dart between the noise and the man he loves but cannot bear to be near right now. His hands reach up, covering his ears tightly to block out the sound, His eyes screw shut, trying to minimise the sensory input and in this moment, Nigel hates the way his mind works, resents the way his beautiful brain does this to him when he needs it all to be calm.

"STOP!"

That’s enough for Nigel. It’s enough for everyone. 

He’s asked to leave and, Christ, he wishes he could stand his ground and demand to stay but as hands touch him and his body is manipulated, Adam shuts down entirely. Nigel has only seen it once before, when the whole world became too loud and too busy and Adam’s consciousness took a break from it all. He explained, when he came back to himself, that it was ‘overload’. Adam calls it a safe-mode shutdown, likens it to Windows when the memory is too low. It’s the only way of describing it that makes any sense at all.

“I just power off and, when I boot back up, I’m safe again.”

It’s hard not to be overloaded in hospital, under the care of those who need to touch in order to help. 

Adam’s eyes flitter closed as the medication takes hold of him. Nigel watches from the doorway as the young nurse strokes his arm to calm him after administering the shot, seemingly unaware that she’s making it worse. Her every gentle movement across his skin is like nails against a chalkboard, like pins and needles against his nerve endings as his brain fights to process the feeling.

He tries to pull his arm away but his body is as uncoordinated as his mind is.

”Don’t touch him,” Nigel says.

For once it doesn’t come out as a threat. 

(*)

It was all about money.

He finds the man who ordered the failed hit in a Latino bar back home. He’s still wearing his gang colours, still wearing the cut of his gang like the second skin that he treats it as. 

Discretion is not Hector Alvarez’s thing. He does not believe in laying low. Nigel used to respect him for that. Now he just pities him; pities himself for the man he used to be. 

Hector is blatant because he has nothing to lose.

There’s absolutely no courage in that. 

He’s alone. Nigel has watched him for three days, now, three days in which Adam has suffered in hospital because of his greed and need for notoriety, three days in which Nigel has gradually had to build back his shattered trust with gentle steps he has never taken with any man before.

Adam is calmer now, at least. His disorder isn’t overwhelming him. He doesn’t remember what happened, be it from shock or blood loss or the trauma of what occurred, and Nigel thanks a God he barely believes in for that because Adam is what’s right in Nigel’s universe and doesn’t deserve to suffer for his sins.

Men like Hector are rogue stars in his jagged constellation.

They are everything that’s wrong in it.

Hector is high. Nigel can see that in the way his lax body hangs in the chair. His shaven head reflects the light in the ceiling as the thin layer of sweat catches it. He’s probably on meth, as seems to be his forte these days. He’s always been one to excessively test the merchandise before he puts it out into the world.

It’s his Achilles Heel because it puts him at a disadvantage. 

Hector is unaware, or seemingly so, but he recognises the click of a safety being released; the feel of hard metal pressed into the back of his skull. He laughs, an empty and hollow sound made lifeless by the drugs. 

There is no life in this man, Nigel thinks. There is no humanity. 

This man deserves to die.

“I was wondering when you’d grow some balls and show up.”

"Did you think I would let you just walk away after what your lapdogs did?"

"Never pinned you as a sentimental type, chico. It was all business.”

Nigel never pinned himself as one either but, even in business, there are lines you simply do not cross.

Adam is a line that nobody will ever cross again.

"You’re weak, friend. You wouldn’t have the cajones to pull the trigger on my patch. Little bitch took your venom, man.”

He turns, allows the barrel to press against his forehead between his black, dilated eyes.

This is bravado.

This is stupidity.

“Go on. Do it. Make yourself famous.” 

There is no hesitation, none at all. 

Nigel pulls the trigger.

It clicks over and over again, six empty rounds being pounded against Hector’s skull. Each and every time, he flinches, just like Adam did in that hospital room because, whilst the drugs give him Dutch courage, the reality of the situation, as it stands, steals it right from under him.

He was expecting Nigel to walk away. 

When Nigel is done, he pushes the other man’s head until it’s flush with the dirty bar, until the snot and the tears are spread across his face and he’s panting out loud. 

He can feel him trembling underneath him, brave Hector Alvarez taken down by nothing but blanks. 

It’s almost intimate, how his lips brush Hector’s ear, how his words cut through the terror like a knife-edged caress. 

"You can thank the ‘little bitch’," he purrs, "for your life. That sentimental enough for you?"

What’s left of this man’s dignity puddles around his feet at the bottom end of a tattered bar stool. 

He pissed himself when Nigel pulled the trigger.

“If you come near him again, I’ll make sure you die without your  
‘cajones’. Comprende?”

“Si. Si.”

It’s satisfying.

It helps. 

(*)

Adam knows how much Nigel has changed him. What he doesn’t realise is how much he has changed Nigel by way of return.

When his healing is well on its way and when the terror of his confusion has passed aside, they sit together in the dim light of his hospital room. 

He’s traumatised, that much is clear in the way his eyes dart to the door each and every time he hears a sound, the way he clings tightly to the bedsheets when someone comes to take a look at him. 

He doesn’t remember what happened, only that somebody hurt him.

He tolerates Nigel’s presence because he knows him, because he love him. Because he believes that Nigel will keep him safe.

There is no blame, not on Adam’s part.

Nigel can’t help but blame himself.

He’s sitting up, now, drains out, arms and body almost free of the IVs that tethered him down. There is colour in his cheeks, pink where they were grey and dead, and a bowl of green jello serenades his internal recovery in bright, jittering glory.

The doctors have cleared him to eat. He wanted Mac and Cheese, as was predictable, but this is what they gave him.

“It’s green.”

Adam doesn’t like the colour. It bothers him to the point that he refuses to touch it, another quirk that Nigel has grown to love, another nuance of Adam’s that transcends and conquers any limit of tolerance he has ever had. 

He recalls the first time they went to a restaurant together, how Adam had barely been functional when faced with too many unfamiliar choices. He’d learned, then, that Adam is set in his ways and it’s easier to simply let him be.

“Adam, you have to eat it. Doctor’s orders. You haven’t eaten in six days.”

“I don’t want it.”

“It’s jello. You love jello.”

“I love jello when it’s red, not when it’s green. Vegetables are green. Plants are green. I like red jello. I don’t like green jello.”

“Would you like me to see if they have any red?”

“Yes. That would make sense. I haven’t eaten in six days.”

Adam calls the shots because that’s the way it has to be.

Later, when he starts to tire, he leans into Nigel, calls him forth. He seeks contact where he repelled it before because his mind is in a better place to process it. There’s power in that, and it hits Nigel square in the gut.

With his arm wrapped gently around the smaller man’s shoulders, he feels a painful sense of protectiveness that stifles him; that suffocates him from within.

He knows, in this moment, that he would die for this man, this man who would never hurt him yet could tear him apart without lifting his finger.

It’s a sobering thought.

He presses his lips to Adam’s ear, much as he did to Hector’s, only this time his words are of love, not hate. They are a promise, not a threat.

“I won’t let anything happen to you, Adam. I promise. Nothing.”

“That just not possible."

“Isn’t it?”

“Things happen every day, Nigel. Lying down is a thing. Sitting up is a thing. Eating is a thing. They’re all things. If nothing happened to me I wouldn’t be living at all.”

When Adam embarks upon the pedantics of his thoughts, so black and white and simple and honest, 

it’s like music to Nigel’s ears.

It’s like stars have realigned.


End file.
